Union Belle (11 page)

‘Now,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair. ‘You know Mum’s not feeling the best?’

They all nodded solemnly.

‘She was in the rain, with no shoes on,’ Robert, the boy from the younger set of twins, said. His thumb crept into his mouth.

‘Was she? Fancy that!’ the doctor said. ‘Now, I need to have a little talk with Mum, to find out why she isn’t feeling well, and then we’ll decide what to do after that, shall we?’

Another round of nods.

Bert came out then, and stood waiting by the door into the hall.

Dr Airey said, ‘In the meantime, why don’t you ask Mrs McCabe to make you some hot cocoa?’ He glanced at Ellen. ‘Something to eat wouldn’t go amiss either. Something sweet.’

Ellen nodded and started looking through the kitchen cupboards for the baking tin.

‘There aren’t any,’ Bert said, ‘if it’s biscuits you’re looking for. Dot hasn’t done any baking for a while.’

‘Sugar or honey in the cocoa will do, and perhaps a sandwich,’ the doctor said as he got to his feet.

Bert followed him out of the kitchen, and Ellen set about making hot drinks and jam sandwiches.

‘Will you go and check on Neil and Davey?’ she asked Tom. She inclined her head at the children, who had arranged themselves around the kitchen table. ‘I think I should stay here for now.’

‘Don’t be long, though, will you?’ he said.

‘I’ll try,’ Ellen replied, although she was prepared to stay all night if she had to, and Tom knew it.

‘Let me know what’s happening, at least.’

She gave him a quick kiss. ‘I will, don’t worry.’

Bert was back out in less than fifteen minutes. He leaned against the bench and crossed his arms, and Ellen could see he was trying not to cry again. She said nothing, but simply waited until he was ready.

‘He said there’s nothing wrong with her physically as far as he can tell, except she’s a bit thin,’ he said finally. He drew in a deep breath, but even so his voice wobbled when he spoke again. ‘He said she’s had a major nervous breakdown.’

Ellen nodded, her hands warm around the cup of tea she was holding.

Bert turned around to stare through the darkened window at the rain. In a voice low enough for his children not to hear, he said, ‘She has to go into hospital, tonight. Dr Airey says he doesn’t think she’s safe. He’s going back to his house to ring an ambulance.’

‘Bert, I’m so sorry. If there’s anything we can do…’

‘You’ve already done it. I don’t know what would have happened if you and Tom hadn’t been here.’

‘You would have managed—you always do,’ Ellen said.

Shaking his head slowly, like a man who can’t quite believe what’s happened to him, Bert said, ‘I don’t think so, not this time. She’s never been this bad before. I just about shit myself when I woke up and found her gone. It’s always been my worse nightmare, this.’

Ellen patted him on the shoulder. She wanted to give him a hug, but wasn’t sure if it would be the right thing to do.

‘They’ll take good care of her, in the hospital.’

Bert looked at her. ‘Will they? Do they really know how to fix this sort of thing?’

Ellen didn’t have a clue. ‘I know they’ll look after her. They did last time, remember?’

‘I know, but she was away for six months then. I don’t want her gone that long again. Christ, I don’t want her gone at all.’

‘It’s for the best, Bert. Dr Airey wouldn’t send her there if he didn’t think so,’ Ellen said. She tried to think of something else to say, something that would comfort him, but couldn’t.

He blinked and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. ‘I’ll go with her tonight. I can’t let her go all the way to Hamilton by herself. What if she wakes up and doesn’t know where she is?’ He looked over at his children. ‘Christ, Ellen, what am I going to tell them?’

‘The truth?’

He regarded her for a moment, then sat slowly down at the table. ‘Kids?’

They waited expectantly, their faces filled with both trust and uncertainty.

‘Mum has to go into hospital and I’m going with her.’

April put her finger in the bowl of her cocoa-stained teaspoon on the table and made the handle bob up and down. ‘When?’

‘Tonight, love. Soon.’

‘Will she be home by the morning?’

Bert hesitated, and Ellen could see how much he wanted to say yes. ‘No, I don’t think so. Not tomorrow.’

Robert started to cry. Bert drew him onto his lap and rocked him in silence.

Ellen put her hand over her mouth to stifle her own tears, which she knew would only upset the kids even more. She dug the fingernails of her right hand into her palm to make doubly sure, then drew in a deep, steadying breath.

‘I know!’ she said. ‘Why don’t you kids all come and stay
at our house tonight? You can bunk down in the sitting room, and then when Neil and Davey wake up in the morning you can make pancakes for breakfast, with golden syrup. Would that be fun?’

Bert regarded her with such a look of gratitude that Ellen almost did cry. The four younger children perked up visibly, but April was watching her father.

‘Is that what you want us to do, Dad?’

‘I think it’s for the best, love. For tonight anyway.’

‘Can I come to the hospital?’

‘No, love, hospital isn’t the sort of place for little girls.’

For a moment April looked as though she was going to argue, then she turned away from him and said to the others, ‘Come on, lets go and get our toothbrushes and some clothes.’

While they were getting ready, Ellen went in to see Dot. She was very pale and still, and for a heart-stopping second Ellen thought she might be dead. Then her chest rose and she realised she was sleeping.

‘I gave her something to calm her down,’ Dr Airey said. He was packing his bag. ‘She should be out for quite a while.’

‘Will she remember what happened tonight?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘Possibly not. I don’t know. I’m going home now to phone for an ambulance, then I’ll come back. I’ll go with them to the hospital and make sure she gets settled in properly.’

Ellen asked, ‘How long do you think she might be in there?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know that either. Arrangements will need to be made for someone to look after the children.’

‘Bert and his mother will do that. I suppose it’s a good thing they’re on strike at the moment and he’s at home.’ She bent down and tucked the covers more snugly around
Dot’s shoulders. ‘Do you think…well, could it have been worry about the strike that brought it on?’

Dr Airey sighed and rubbed his chin. ‘Perhaps. It’s very difficult to say. Worry can do funny things to people, Ellen.’ He regarded her wearily, as if he’d seen far too much of this sort of thing. ‘And so can loneliness, and disappointment. And boredom.’

Ellen didn’t meet his eyes.

April 1951

T
om was chopping wood on the back lawn. Normally they used coal in the range, but there wasn’t any at the moment—ironically because he and the other miners were refusing to dig it out. He was sweating beneath his singlet, and out of sorts, and worried.

Prendiville had had his secret ballot, but none of the local underground unions had taken part—they’d voted unanimously against it a few days ago at a meeting at the town hall. The opencasters had gone along with it, though, and unbelievably, they’d voted to go back. Or at least a lot of them had; there were still a few who were refusing to break the strike. It had been a huge shock, although they hadn’t returned to work yet.

In the past, the opencast miners in the area had approached the Waikato Miners’ Union several times and asked to join. But the central council had turned them down repeatedly, maintaining that most of them sat on their arses in trucks all day and weren’t real miners anyway. So they’d formed their own Opencast Miners’ Union, although they did have a couple of delegates on the central council. Like everyone else, Tom had always assumed that the opencasters would either stand loyal during any industrial action, or if they didn’t, that the underground unions would be able to knock them into line without too much trouble. But obviously they’d been wrong about that, badly wrong.

They’d overlooked one thing—opencast miners could
be replaced much more readily than underground miners, because the levels of skill required were quite different, so the opencast men had more to lose, and would lose it sooner, if they refused to go back to work. And because they had their own union, they also had their own mandate, and they’d used it.

Tom swore and spat on the ground. He had good mates in the opencast mines, at Kimihia and around Rotowaro, and had no desire to fall out with them. But if they persisted with going back to work, he would hound them and harass them, and even beat the living shit out of them if he had to, because no honest union man tolerated a scab under any circumstances. Scabs were the scourge of militant unionism, wreckers of solidarity and thieves of workers’ rights. And once a scab, always a scab.

He laid his axe on the ground and sat down on the chopping block; he was knackered too, after the business with Dot the other night. He’d been having one of his nightmares and had nearly crapped himself when Ellen had woken him up. He’d belted her one as well and still felt terrible about it, even though he’d apologised and she’d said not to worry. And he was sorry, because he’d never raised a hand to her before and couldn’t understand why it had happened this time, even if he had been half asleep. He loved her dearly, although maybe he didn’t tell her that quite as much as he should, and would rather cut his own arm off than deliberately hurt her. He’d worked bloody hard to make her his, and every day since had been worth it. She was beautiful and bright and soft and warm, she washed and cooked and cleaned for him, she’d given him two fine sons, she understood him and she didn’t care that he wasn’t perfect, like when he woke up screaming and sweating and crying out that he was shit-scared.

His nightmares were awful. The accident had happened
in 1947, just after the Easter pay strike, but he was still dreaming about it as though it had only been last week. It drained him, and always set him thinking again about what had happened, which he dreaded. He’d discovered that he wasn’t the man he’d always believed himself to be, and that had been worse than any of the rest of it put together.

1947

‘Hey, Tom, where did we get?’

Tom was walking towards the pithead after the cavil, the drawing of lots every three months to determine where each pair of men would be working underground. It was a fair system, because it ensured that the bosses couldn’t allocate the worst sections to the men they didn’t like, and vice versa. And there were some fairly shitty places: faces on slopes that meant you’d be shovelling uphill all day, or sections where the coal was harder than it was anywhere else.

He looked over his shoulder to see his partner, Johnno Batten, running to catch up, the battery and gas mask on his work belt bouncing, rucksack swinging over one shoulder, and his hard hat with the lamp on the front jammed low on his forehead. As usual he’d been stuck in the shithouse for ages, and had missed the cavil.

‘North, that new section Doug and Wobbly started.’

‘Shit,’ Johnno said, and slowed down to a walk. ‘Doug reckons it’s been working a bit on and off.’

Tom shrugged. He and Johnno had been partners on the coal for nearly two years now, and both had been around long enough to know that when a section was ‘working’—if the roof was creaking and moving—it didn’t always mean it was going to come in.

He checked his watch: five to eight. There was no point going down five minutes early—their shift was from eight
in the morning until three in the afternoon, and not a second longer, but, if they could get away with it, hopefully shorter—so he squatted down near the shadowed mouth of the mine and rolled a smoke. It would be his last until he came up again at the end of the day, as you couldn’t smoke underground because of the gas. Johnno hunkered down and joined him.

The rest of the shift milled about the entrance smoking, laughing and coughing in the early autumn air, until, exactly on the dot of eight, they headed into the drive, down into the warm dark throat of the mine towards the dimly gleaming coal.

It took them about twenty-five minutes to walk down to where they were currently working, each step taking them further and further away from the sunlight. Johnno whistled tunelessly almost the whole way, until someone finally told him to shut it.

Tom said, ‘You’re a box of birds today.’

Joe Takoko, a big Maori with the solid arms and shoulders of a seasoned miner, said, ‘Yeah, all shit and feathers,’ and everyone laughed.

‘It’s my birthday,’ Johnno said. ‘Donna’s got a treat for me tonight.’

‘Your annual root?’ suggested Red Canning, Joe Takoko’s partner.

More laughter.

‘No, better than that,’ Johnno said. ‘Roast pork, with peas and roast potatoes and cabbage, and apple cobbler for pud.’ He paused. ‘With cream.’

Joe stopped and made a show of patting his pockets. ‘Bugger, I seem to have misplaced my dinner invitation.’

‘Fuck off,’ Johnno said, laughing. ‘It’s
my
birthday.’

‘Twenty-one again, eh?’ Vic Anscombe said.

‘Nearly. Thirty-three.’

Tom made a mental note to come up with some sort of prank to play on Johnno before the day was out, to mark the momentous occasion.

The tunnel gradually flattened out and they came to the layby where they stored their heavy gear between shifts. Then, pair by pair, the men began to head off to their new sections.

Tom and Johnno’s was at the furthest edge of the working face, and wrapped in total blackness except for the narrow, conical beams of yellow light from the lamps mounted on their hats. It was within hearing distance of adjacent sections, however, and as they settled down to start work they could hear the others doing the same.

The coal was mined using the bord and pillar method, and excavated in a pattern of grids about a chain square. Bords, or underground roads, were tunnelled into the solid coal and the coal removed, then cross-cuts driven at right angles to the bords, forming a pillar of coal in the centre. The pillar was then mined out as well, where possible, leaving the roof held up by nothing except the wooden props the miners put in as they excavated. It could be extremely dangerous work because the props didn’t always hold.

The mine covered a large area underground, but only part of it was actively mined at any one time. On their way down to work every day the men passed the sealed entrances to goafs—areas that had been worked out and closed off permanently to stop gas leaking into the rest of the mine, and to minimise the risk and impact of fire. A barrier of brattice cloth nailed to boards divided the main tunnel, with fresh air travelling down into the mine on one side of the cloth, and the foul air being sucked out along the other side by an extractor fan on the surface.

The main tunnel also housed the endless rope, the mechanised, perpetually moving line that took empty
skips into the mine and hauled full skips out, where they would be spragged at the surface to slow them down, unclipped and redirected to the screens. Underground, near the working coal faces, the empty skips were taken off the rope and pushed by hand by truckers along temporary rails to where the miners blasted and shovelled, to be filled then pushed back to the rope, clipped on again and sent back to the surface. Tom had done his time as a trucker, and still couldn’t decide which was the harder job—shovelling coal or pushing the bloody skips.

He felt something strike his hat. He looked up and noted with satisfaction that the roof was dripping; good, they might be on wet time today and finish their shift a good hour earlier than normal.

‘Water,’ he said to Johnno, who glanced up and nodded.

Johnno cocked his head and listened for several seconds. ‘Can you hear that?’

Tom stood still and closed his eyes. He could hear it, too; the constant creaking, scratching and faraway grinding that indicated that the fireclay above them was on the move. It was nothing to worry about, though—nothing solid was trickling down, and the faintness of the noise suggested that not much was shifting in their immediate area.

‘She’ll be right,’ he said eventually. ‘We’ll put in some extra timbers before we blast.’

Johnno nodded. They’d both experienced this eerie shifting of the earth before and there’d always been plenty of time to get out before anything happened.

They erected three stout props, then used their pickaxes to chisel out a cut in the coal face six feet high, three feet deep and a foot wide, to give the coal somewhere to go when it was blown. Without the cut, nothing would move. Then, using three different-sized hand drills, Johnno carefully
bored a six-foot hole at an angle into the cut where the powder and detonator would go. They couldn’t fire their own shots because only the deputy had a shot-firer’s ticket, and if it wasn’t to his liking, if it was too tight or too short, he’d piss off again until it had been done properly and they’d get behind and lose that much of the day’s pay. A mis-shot also wasted time. The good thing about being paid by the ton was that on a productive day you got good money, but on the other hand, on a slow day you didn’t.

Tom opened his powder tin and pushed five plugs, plus one extra because the coal was so hard, into the back of the hole with the tip of the six-foot drill, then followed that with a detonator, making sure that the wires were left hanging out. Then he slid in the dummies—rolled-up newspapers filled with damp clay—which he tamped in firmly.

They were sitting down when the deputy arrived. Tom’s singlet was soggy with sweat already, and he stank. So did Johnno. So did everyone working underground. The air and the temperature weren’t too bad in the main tunnel, but beyond that, in the sections where the air didn’t flow as readily, it was almost unbearably hot and stuffy. Tom was well used to it by now, but he was always grateful walking back up out of the mine at the end of a shift when he felt the first tickles of cool, fresh air on his face, drying the sweat there and setting the coal dust on his skin and in his ears and in the corners of his mouth and eyes.

‘Happy birthday,’ the deputy, Sean McGinty, said to Johnno.

‘Ta.’

McGinty winked. ‘No one played any nasty tricks on you yet?’

Johnno grinned. ‘Not yet.’

‘Well, don’t worry, it’s only half past nine.’

Johnno rolled his eyes. Without a doubt, something
would be done to him today; miners were very keen on their practical jokes. And he should know, because he was responsible for a lot of them.

McGinty moved over to the hole in the cut, had a quick squint down it and nodded. ‘That’ll do.’

He attached the detonator wires to his cable and began backing away, playing out the cable as he went. ‘Away you go,’ he said to Tom and Johnno, and the three of them retreated along the bord until they were some distance away from the coal face and around a corner so they could no longer see it.

‘Ready?’ McGinty asked.

Tom and Johnno nodded, and jammed their fingers in their ears. McGinty crouched over the battery and fired the shot. There was a muffled whump, felt rather than heard, and a moment later a haze of thick coal dust billowed from the direction of the face, settled silently over them and temporarily obscured even the light from their lamps.

When it cleared, McGinty hoicked and spat out a gob of dirty phlegm. ‘Fucking hell, you jokers, how much powder did you put in?’

Tom shrugged. He and Johnno always put in as much as they could get away with; the more coal that came down the better, as far as they were concerned.

They trudged back to the face, and nodded in appreciation at the small mountain of coal that had spilled out onto the ground.

‘Right,’ McGinty said. ‘I’ll be back after crib time to do the next one.’

As he left, his boots squelching in the slurry of coal and mud underfoot, a trucker arrived pushing an empty skip and Tom and Johnno set about filling it with the loose coal.

They stopped for smoko, then worked solidly until five
minutes to twelve, at which time they swapped their shovels for crib tins and headed back towards the layby in the main tunnel where they habitually ate their lunch.

Doug Walmsley and Wobbly Minogue, so named because of what happened to him whenever he consumed more than three bottles of beer, were already there, and Tom could see Joe Takoko and Red Canning also emerging from the gloom.

Tom dropped his crib tin on the filthy table with a clatter. Doug was reading the paper and Wobbly was opening his tin with extreme caution. Tom grinned. Poor old Wobbly still hadn’t recovered from a recent incident when Johnno had nailed his crib tin to the table while he was off having a leak, one six-inch nail straight through the middle of his packet of sandwiches, another through his apple and a third through a slab of fly-cemetery cake lovingly baked by Mrs Wobbly. Johnno had declared it was revenge for the fact that every day without fail Wobbly had tinned sardines on his sandwiches, which, according to Johnno, stank out the entire mine.